Writing
Intent
Writing and the teaching of writing is fundamental in our Shakespeare Primary curriculum. It is vital that every child learns to write from the very beginning of their journey with us. In order to be a successful writer, children must be equipped with the necessary building blocks to be able to express themselves. We believe in immersing children in a vocabulary-rich learning environment which encourages our children to express ideas and explore their own writer’s voice. We encourage our children to write in creative and imaginative ways and value the power of talk every step of the way. Our writing curriculum has been carefully designed to ensure that children explore high-quality texts with rich opportunities for discussion, debate and critical thinking. Through purposeful links to our wider curriculum, children are inspired and motivated to write for a range of purposes - developing confidence, independence and a love of writing.
Our aims in writing are to ensure our Shakespeare children:
- Become enthusiastic, confident and fluent writers
- Develop a love, enjoyment and thirst for writing
- Gain a secure knowledge of genre and text-type specific features and elements
- Write clearly, accurately and coherently; adapting language and style across a range of contexts
- Understand how choices can create and enhance effect for the audience
- Acquire and use a wide range of ambitious vocabulary and sentence structures
- Understand and apply compositional knowledge of grammar, punctuation and spelling
- Express, discuss and challenge ideas in order to think critically about the writing process
- Are able plan, draft, revise and evaluate their own writing and that of others
Implementation
Writing at Shakespeare is a cornerstone of the entire curriculum and interwoven throughout all subjects. Our long-term plans and overviews ensure that, across all year groups, children are taught the necessary skills and components to write independently at an age-related standard. Throughout their time at Shakespeare, children are given the opportunity to practise, apply and consolidate their writing skills within writing lessons and across the wider curriculum. In addition, our Shakespeare Curriculum ensures our children access a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry within writing and reading. In doing so, all children are exposed to different types of texts and genres; and are able to apply their own choices and enhance their strengths as a writer.
Being a writer means being a reader, articulating stories and characters, listening to tales and learning from other writers.
Impact
With the implementation of our Talk for writing approach, children become enthusiastic, confident and fluent writers. During their writing journey, they make good progress; gain the essential knowledge of genres, text types, grammar and punctuation allowing them to become competent writers who can write for a range of purposes and audiences.
Evidence of impact on the children include:
- Children enjoy writing and find the process creative, enriching and fulfilling
- Children know how to and are confident to develop their ideas
- Children make informed choices about what they are writing and why they are writing
- Children understand how to reflect upon, refine and improve their own work
- Children are able to think critically and are able to communicate their thoughts
- Children can respond to the constructive feedback of others and make collaborative improvements
Year 2 have been creating their own Superhero characters. Today, we went and told the EYFS children all about our ideas. We think the Class R’s were pretty impressed....
Year 6 have been busy planning, writing and editing narratives including character / setting descriptions. We have also been developing our understanding and knowledge of vocabulary language inside comprehension lessons while also writing non -chronological reports.
Year 1 have been writing about what they would do if they were a pirate. .
This week Year 1's writing links to the lovely story Marmaduke.
In Year 3 we have been creating our own word carpet using exciting adjectives. We had a walk around the carpet and chose some adjectives to include in our writing to make our writing more interesting.
It's time for some non-fiction writing in Class R! Frogspawn, tadpoles and hopefully some frogs soon! We read a lovely story called 'Growing Frogs' in our nature garden. Miss Hayton got to sit on the huge story chair for the first time this year and we loved our story in the sunshine. We didn't have far to go to see the things from our story in our real life pond! Then we wrote captions for our life cycle of a frog! 🐸🌞
In Year one the children have been doing writing linked to the book Norman The Slug With The Silly Shell.
Year 3- We have been learning how to edit our writing. We have looked closely at finding missing capital letters, full stops and spelling errors. We use green pens to correct our work. We love doing this and pretending we are the teacher.
We love doing comprehension in Year 5. Here we are having our weekly discussion and recording our answers on big paper.
In English year 2 have been thinking about how characters feel. They have been thinking of words to describe this.
Year 6 examples of writing ( before editing and after editing)
In Year 4, Mr Hobley's group have spent time preparing and performing YouTube-style reviews of our book; The Lost Happy Endings.
We just love the book 'The Perfect Fit' by Naomi Jones! The characters are so kind and friendly and they have so much fun together. We recreated illustrations from the story and thought about what they would be saying. As usual we tried so hard to form our letters correctly and sound out words to help us with our spelling. We used our knowledge from past lessons on speech bubbles.
EYFS- Lots of fine motor and handwriting practise this week.
Our Reception class children have been engrossed in reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears. They have been practising their sentence writing by writing letters and speech bubbles. The children have also been using their knowledge of the story characters to act out the story and do some hot seating!
Our Year 1 children love 'Stickman' and Mr Wolf and his pancakes! The children have been learning about the use of speech bubbles and how to write instructions, lists and captions. Look at their wonderful writing!
Year 2 can use apostrophes!!
In our Year 3 English lessons we have been thinking about our favourite parts of the story, creating a word bank using words from the book and writing and editing our own stories.
Year 3 used story stones to re tell their own legends from the sea, inspired from their visit to the beach.
